A blog about combining wargaming with real life, incorporating comments about how to make the most of being a grown up and a wargamer.

Tuesday, 9 August 2011

How Annoying is That?

I said recently that Peter Pig were releasing some new figures for the Spanish Civil War range and expressed my hopes for what these might be.

My preferences were driven by the fact that over the last 12 months I have acquired probably close to £300 worth of metal from Mr Pig’s SCW range and I’m looking to fill in some holes. What I don’t want to do is replace what I’ve bought and painted, so I’m not crying out for re-sculpts of the existing range.

Well, it’s a bit of both really. The Nationalist basic packs have been retired and replaced by new sculpts, adding some extra poses and what you might call “greater granularity” in the pack contents. Previously you got a mix of advancing & firing figures in each pack. Now there’s a pack of each pose type, which is certainly an improvement. The poses on the website look excellent, with the normal Peter Pig animation. His figures really do look alive, and whilst they are bulking up a bit they haven’t been down the gym & on the steroids like most of the Warlord 28mm and their ilk.

From the pictures posted so far the figures are in the fairly standard Spanish uniform, with the waisted jacket, slight jodhpur-ish trousers and gaiters. They have the “Y” belt webbing and pouches, and of course, the gorillo cap (or chip bag hat, if you prefer). As such they can be used for any regular forces almost. Some with helmets would be good, so unless these are done we need some spare heads to swap over.

Alas for me I don’t actually need them. Not at the moment. I might want to add some more Peninsula army type units so they’ll do for that (they’ll have to – the old packets have been retired) and that also means they’ll be in different units so if there’s a size difference I can keep them apart. Of course if some more useful figures with the helmets come out then I’d take those instead.

Well, it’s an exciting start, and they show that Martin Goddard is probably the best sculptor of 15mm figures around. Hopefully there’s more to come, but if he’s going to do this sort of thing for the rest of the range he’s got a big task ahead of him. These ones were planned as far back as Partizan this year, so project that forward for a pipeline for a similar batch of figures, and take out time for doing some new WW2 SS figures then factor in the end of the summer holidays (Martin is a teacher and will have to go back to work) and you can see we might be waiting for a while for the next lot.

My concern would be that he’ll target the International Brigades next. Whilst these have a high profile in the non-hispanic literature they’re only a small part of the war. In that respect their role was a triumph for communist propaganda. What games need are lots of militia and Popular Army, and although you often see the former the latter are less common. “Uniforms” aren’t nice enough I expect when you can spend your time painting people in monos with red & black neckerchiefs.

About Me

I have been a wargamer as long as I can remember, pretty much.
My interests spread pretty generally across the entire historical period. I mostly prefer to develop and use my own rules. As such I've been a member of Wargames Developments since the early 80's.
I do use commercially available rules and have a large collection, - many of which have been played. I've been fond of the RFCM approach from Peter Pig in the past, and I make a lot of use of Neil Thomas' rules. They always seem a good place to start.